Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice Is a Stoner Epic

And a little sad, too

The freewheeling '60s are gone, replaced by a 1970 bummer of a hangover, in Inherent Vice. Unseen, malevolent forces have taken control of everyone and everything. At the center of this world is Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a Southern California pothead private eye with blood-red eyes, bushy muttonchops, and a joint permanently poised between his lips. Multiple characters' "What's up, Doc?" greetings make it clear that Doc is something of a wily cartoon caricature. Yet he's one who's superbly embodied by Phoenix with a mix of Bugs Bunny physicality and, beneath his exterior, a ragged, gnawing mournfulness. Doc is still recovering from the departure of his former gal Shasta Fey Hepworth (alluring newcomer Katherine Waterston), who reappears at the outset of Inherent Vice to inform him that her new man, real estate mogul Mickey Wolfman (Eric Roberts), may soon be set up by his wife Sloane (Serena Scott Thomas) and her lover. However, if Doc is lovelorn for Shasta, he's also shouldering a deeper burden, born from the sense, hanging in the air all around him, that the Summer of Love is long over, bought and sold and repackaged by the mainstream.

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Paul Thomas Anderson's alternately blissful and doleful stoner epic is a decidedly curious beast, which is no surprise given that it's also a distinctly faithful adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's outrageous 2009 novel. While Anderson reorders, condenses, and cuts down Pynchon's sprawling saga, he retains that tome's freewheeling plotting and attendant atmosphere of being lost in a THC haze, and feeling manipulated by barely visible plots and power players. Opening with the image of the glorious Pacific Ocean spied between bungalows (one of which is Doc's home), Inherent Vice proceeds to tell a tale about people caught between two eras, and between those periods' promises of freedom and constraint. As Doc begins looking into the strange circumstances involving Wolfman, what he finds are fellow hippies and weirdoes — including his lawyer Sauncho (Benecio Del Toro) and his lawyer girlfriend Penny (Reese Witherspoon) — in thrall to big business, the feds, the drug trade, and other assorted politicos and bigwigs riding the rising tide of Ronald Reagan's Cali governorship and Richard Nixon's presidency.

Doc coasts through his investigation as if on a cloud of smoke, stumbling and bumbling through one encounter after another with a lackadaisical quality that's mirrored by Anderson's gently bobbing cinematography. His sleuthing puts him into contact with strippers in league with heroin traders, hired assassins on the LAPD payroll, deviant dentists doing drugs with young free-thinking girls, blacklisted actors whose careers have been restored because they embraced the anti-communist movement, and black militants working with white supremacists. He's repeatedly led to a solo saxophonist named Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), who reportedly OD'd on bad smack but isn't actually dead, having been "resurrected" — replete with a sighting at the center of a band party feast that Anderson stages like a stoner-pizza Last Supper — to work as a puppet for the cops and shadowy subversive groups.

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If that sounds convoluted, there's also "Bigfoot" Bjornson (a pitch-perfect Josh Brolin), a flat-topped LAPD detective who loathes hippies but poses as one in TV commercials for Wolfman's housing developments, has a bit part on Adam-12, and functions as a constant thorn in Doc's side. Like everyone else in Inherent Vice, Bigfoot is a figure at once driven to manipulate and at the mercy of others' constant manipulations (including his wife). And so he eventually becomes surprisingly similar to Doc, who's also being tricked into doing various people's dirty deeds while attempting to untangle the barbed knot in which he finds himself. Lucidity constantly threatens to evaporate throughout Anderson's tale, even with dreamy and introspective narration from Doc's gal pal Sortilège (Joanna Newsom). But even when the who-what-whys get a bit cloudy, they're connected by pervasive outside control. No matter where you look in Inherent Vice, someone's working for someone else, whether they're aware of it or not, as if Anderson is suggesting its grip still haunts us today.

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Anderson embraces pulp noir to evoke current concerns, and his prime source of inspiration is Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (and, by extension, the classical noirs that inspired that 1973 gem), which similarly updated an old-school Raymond Chandler crime drama for the hippie era. To that end, his soundscape includes naturally recorded conversations occasionally obscured by peripheral speakers' speech, and his action is often confined to two people talking in a single room, with his camera ever so slowly pushing into close-up. The result is that, even on an aesthetic level, Inherent Vice always feels like it's trying to move between chasms, be they across people, places, eras, or ethos.

Inherent Vice is frequently a riot, thanks to a raft of sterling performances (led by Phoenix, Waterston, Brolin, and Martin Short) that hang precariously on the edges of mania, melancholy, and absurdity. Yet as it navigates its way through conspiracies involving mysterious ships, a cabal of evildoers known as The Golden Fang, and other random wackos, the jokes become laced with despondence. The general impression is that even the intrepid Doc isn't above the muck in which he's mired, and in fact he may be just as beholden to the powers-that-be as the kidnapped moguls, spirited-away beauties, and patsies that he's investigating.

A kindred spirit to yesteryear's gumshoes and today's anti-conformity individualists (the ones you can find), Doc is a man on a universal quest for liberation from the many institutional interests that want to co-opt him. As such, it's Wilson's Coy who ultimately emerges as central to Doc's tale. In Coy, Doc finds an opportunity to right at least one wrong in a world increasingly in thrall to corporate, criminal, and federal influence. Through those efforts, which culminate with separate happy reunions for both Coy and Doc, he discovers that even amid all the oppressive buzzkill, there's still freedom to be found in the arms of the one you love.

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